Category: Archives
-
The West German police, the RAF manhunt and the killing of a British citizen: Reading the (slim) FCO file on the death of Iain Macleod
This is the draft of a paper that I presented at the online conference of the Australasian Association of European Historians last year. It is a reading of the rather slim FCO file on the death of Iain Macleod, a British citizen who was killed by the West German police during a raid on a…
-
Using surveillance records as a historical source
The Undercover Policing Inquiry was established in 2015 to examine the actions of undercover police in Britain between the 1960s and the 1990s, particularly the surveillance and infiltration of activist organisations by the Special Demonstrations Squad and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. As part of this inquiry, a large number of documents have been…
-
Radical history online – a list of collections
I am very interested in the growing amount of radical literature from around the world that is being scanned and digitised. As there are so many and from many different places, I thought it would be useful to make a list. All of those that are included are free to access (there are others that…
-
Communist Party of Australia’s Rupert Lockwood on the Common Market (c.1961)
In the early 1960s, Britain first tried to join the Common Market. The British Labour Party, the trade unions and the Communist Party opposed this, arguing that it was creating a supranational capitalist entity that served no purpose for the British working class (or the other working classes of Western Europe). This can be seen…
-
Archiving the left – CPGB’s ‘Racism: How to Combat It’ (1978)
In 1978, the Communist Party of Great Britain produced two pamphlets dealing with anti-racism and anti-fascism. One was A Knife at the Throat of Us All: Racism and the National Front by National Organiser, Dave Cook. The other was Racism: How to Combat It by the CPGB’s National Race Relations Committee. Cook’s pamphlet outlined the…
-
ASIO memo on Germaine Greer from 1971
I am currently putting together a work-in-progress paper on ASIO’s monitoring of the women’s liberation movement in Australia for an upcoming symposium hosted by the ANU Gender Institute, ‘How the Personal Became Political: Reassessing Australia’s Revolutions in Gender and Sexuality in the 1970s’. As part of the several ASIO on the WLM that have been…
-
Some highlights from the CIA’s recent document dump online
This week, the Central Intelligence Agency uploaded more than 12 million documents onto its online library, allowing access to previously unavailable declassified material ranging from the 1940s to the 1990s. There is a lot of interesting material for researchers to wade through, but here are some of my initial highlights: A 1949 report on the…
New Historical Express 